by the United States House Intelligence Committee

“ And so we spent a lot of time looking at them. I, as sort of an amateur student of Russian oligarchs and criminals, I hadn't come across them before. So I thought -- I at first didn't think they were that interesting. But as we've, you know, learned more about them, it's become more troubling.
You know, I now -- I know now that they've been -- the Agalarovs started operating in the United States around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and are associated with people who are connected to previous episodes of money laundering that are serious, the Bank of New York scandal. ”

“ But in any event, we did look at some Kushner stuff and specifically focused on the project in Jersey City, I think partly because Trump had a position in that project, and discovered that it was -- one of the central mysteries of Donald Trump is that, you know, beginning in the mid-2000s he was not a creditworthy businessman.
And so he -- you know, so if you're analyzing, you know, someone who says they're a billionaire but can't get a bank loan, you know, there's this whole issue of where is the credit coming from. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: So, you know, I could probably think of other things, but I think one thing that is worth looking at is the relationships among people that are not known to be related, whether the Agalarovs know the Arifs, whether some of the other Russian oligarchs, whether they have social or business relationships, including that Roman Abramovich. And I think this question of the travel histories of Don Jr. and Ivanka, and whether they had other meetings with Russians is an area that is unexhausted. ”

“ You don't know how to investigate whether someone is engaged in corruption or whether they've got a bad business history. And so, you know, you hire someone who specializes in that kind of work. So we specialize in finding records and reading things and digesting large volumes of information.
MR. GOWDY: If I understood your testimony correctly, you don't specialize in political opposition research?
MR. SIMPSON: It's not a major line of business for us. It's, you know, every couple of years, 3, 4, when there's a Presidential campaign we get asked to do stuff. ”

“ And many of the oligarchs are also mafia figures.
And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over both the oligarchs and the mafia groups.
And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is believed by law enforcement criminologists to have -- to be under the influence of the Russian security services. ”

“ And what we, you know, gradually begun to understand, which, you know, I suppose I should kick myself for not figuring out earlier, but I don't know that much about the real estate business, which is I alluded to this earlier, so, you know, by 2003, 2004, Donald Trump was not able to get bank credit for -- and if you're a real estate developer and you can't get bank loans, you know, you've got a problem.
And all these guys, they used leverage like, you know -- so there's alternative systems of financing, and sometimes it's -- well, there's a variety of alternative systems of financing. ”

“ And I believe there are lawsuits in Toronto with similar allegations and the guys connected to the Toronto project are Russian mafia too. And, in fact, there's Toronto-based Russian mafia guys who are involved in the Panama project.
And in any event, so the origin of the allegations is defrauded buyers. The real chumps or the marks are the guys at the end of the process who come in thinking that they're going to be moving into a building that's already got all this, you know, financing and other tenants and it turns out that those people have walked away. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: No one hired me to investigate Hillary Clinton in 2015 or 2016. What did happen is that issues about Hillary Clinton came up in other investigations, and I can't remember the specifics, and I just remember they came up. A lot of times when we have a client come to us because of some business matter that is connected to politics or policy in Washington, the question of whether there was improper influence is part of the research. ”

“ Generally speaking, the market niche that we occupy is not the opposition research niche. I don't think our pricing structure is conducive to getting opposition research business, which is -- generally doesn't pay very well.
MR. GOWDY: Well, given that and given the fact that it's not your niche, why did the Washington Free Beacon approach you about doing the research on candidate Trump?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, one of our, you know, specialties that I think people know is that we are good at business investigations, corporate investigations, and Mr. Trump is a big businessman. ”

“ And you know, we investigated -- so there was in one of the early memos, might even have been the first one, said "Money is being distributed in the United States through the auspices of pension payments." And you know, they are basically getting the money into the country and handing it out using fake pension payments. And this is like one of those things that I ran down as a way of evaluating the credibility of the dossier or of this memo. And so the question is, Well, do the Russians hand out lots of money in the United States through pension payments? ”

“ I thought it was a possible crime of progress and that there was possibly very serious crimes, but, you know, I'm an ex-journalist, so I'm not really in a position to prove that anyone's engaged in a crime.
I mean, you know, sometimes you do find proof of criminal activity in an investigation, but more often than not you find things that are suggestive or raise questions. And --
MR. ROONEY: Right. That's exactly my point, is that if we knew that Donald Trump was working with the Russian mafia to fund Doonbeg in Ireland, then there's no way he would be President. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: Yes. I’m trying to remember. In general, we knew from the open source work that we had done that Donald Trump Jr. was -- had done a lot of travel to Russia and was involved in a lot of these discussions, that he'd done -- he'd gone to Kazakhstan for reasons that we didn't -- we weren't sure of, he'd gone to Latvia, and he'd been to Russia. And we eventually formed the view that the Russians were very interested in him or that he'd had a lot of deals with them.
I don't remember a lot of specifics beyond that. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: I didn't share it with most of my employees. Yes, to answer you, generally speaking we compartmentalize things, both like a law firm would, and in running an intelligence operation you would too. So if we are -- so we don't tell one subcontractor what another subcontractor is doing. We don't tell our subs who our clients are. And we certainly don't tell one client what we are doing with another client.
MR. SCHIFF: And Ms. Veselnitskaya never fed you information that made it into the materials that you were providing your Perkins Coie client? ”

“ And obviously, evaluating human intelligence is not the same thing as looking at documents. And so it's a much trickier process and the thresholds are different. And so what you're really trying to do, which is kind of like interviewing in journalism, is figure out whether there's reason to think that what's being said is credible. And so we did a lot of that.
MR. GOWDY: Can you give me an example of something that he produced to you that you found to be not credible?
MR. SIMPSON: No, I don't think anything comes to mind. ”

“ Trump's connections to Russia, either in the first phase or the second phase of your work, separate and apart from Mr. Steele's so-called dossier?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, eventually, partly through Sergi Millian, partly through other things we learned, we gradually began to understand more about Michael Cohen, the President's lawyer, and his background, and that he had a lot of connections to the former Soviet Union, and that he seemed to have associations with organized crime figures in New York and Florida, Russian organized crime figures. ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: Well, we've only had a very small number of political clients. So I can tell you, I mean, our methodology doesn't really change. We -- my firm is -- all the principals are former journalists, so we don't come out of the political combat industry. We come out of the, you know, journalism industry, which is all about sort of sticking to the facts and not leaping to conclusions and not trying to, you know, come up with a hit piece on anybody. So, generally speaking, you know, what we get compensated for is producing reliable treatments of whatever the subject is. ”

“ And you don't want your client trying to make an issue of his business career if he's a brilliant businessman who knows how to make money in an honest and ethical way.
MR. GOWDY: All right. Let me ask you about a couple words you just used. You just used the words "good" and "bad," which some would argue are inherently subjective; but you also used the word "facts," and what did you mean when you used the word "facts"?
MR. SIMPSON: I mean, factual information is -- a lot of what we do is gather facts. And sometimes facts are provable facts; sometimes facts are established facts ”

“ You know, instead of, you know, breaking into the CIA, you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open.
So anyway, in the course of reading up on my espionage cases, I found a case involving a guy named Buryakov, Evgeny or Eugene, who worked for, I think, it was Sberbank and he was arrested as an illegal Russian intelligence agent. And then in the prosecution, they identified people that he was trying to recruit. And one of the guys fit the description of Carter Page. ”

“ MR. SCHIFF: And, you know, from your description of your relationship with Mr. Steele, I take it that you sent him to find what he could find. You didn't send him to go find evidence of candidate Trump entertaining women in whatever way in a hotel.
MR. SIMPSON: No. But I think this underscores a really important point, which is that so kompromat is a big deal for Chris Steele. It is not a big deal for Glenn Simpson, because my professional world is financial crime and politics and the other things. But he is in Russian intelligence. ”

“ So, you know, if you're familiar with Donald Trump's finances and the litigation over whether he's really a billionaire, you know, there's good reason to believe he doesn't have enough money to do this and that he would have had to have outside financial support for these things. ”

“ So the extent to which they are funding persons within let's say the Russian Orthodox church or funding the church, is the expectation then that those who are here in the United States, members of the Russian Orthodox church are doing something on behalf of Russia? ”

“ MR. SIMPSON: So it's obviously a challenging thing to assess human intelligence, field interviews, and it is different from looking at a lawsuit. But there are similarities to the interview process in journalism, where there are elements of people, what people say that you can check.
And so, you know, for example, in one report they described how the Kremlin's election operation was being run by Sergei Ivanov, who is the head of the presidential administration, and, you know, gave a number of details about that. ”

“ And I'll add parenthetically that when I was working as a reporter and living in Brussels and investigating Russian corruption and organized crime, I had met Mr. Browder and asked him for help investigating Vladimir Putin, and he had lectured me on Putin not being corrupt and being a bit -- someone who's very helpful to -- the best thing that had happened to Russia in a long time. ”

“ I'd say -- I could generalize and say that, you know, as we've got deeper and deeper into understanding, you know, Donald Trump's business career and his history, it gradually reached a point where it seemed like most of the people around Trump had a connection to Russian organized crime or Russia in one way or another. ”

“ We -- you know, they identified -- one memo identified a Russian guy who worked for an NGO called Rossotrudnichestvo, which is -- you know, I didn't know it at the time, but I was able to learn from looking at it that the FBI considers that to be a front for the SVR. So, you know, either the people were extremely knowledgeable about a lot of obscure intelligence stuff or, you know, they -- what they're saying had some credibility.
I'll add that, you know, again, like journalism, British Intelligence methodology is a kind of strict recitation of what sources are saying. ”

“ MR. SCHIFF: And didn't you, during the course of your work, uncover any information regarding a connection between Trump or those around him and WikiLeaks?
MR. SIMPSON: Yes. I mean, you've seen some of the public reporting. We gradually -- I mean, this would be separate from the Steele stuff, but, you know, we gradually towards the end of the project became very interested in -- you know, Roger Stone bragged about having his contact. ”

“ Very suspicious. I didn't get to ask you about that, but -- it's always the Russians. Like everybody's got a 10 or a 9 and the Russians are like 5.
MR. SCHIFF: Before I pass it off to Mr. Quigley, you didn't have a chance to answer one of the questions I posed at the end. That is, we do have the subpoena power. If we are to get to the bottom of the issue of whether Russian organized crime money was used in the flipping of these properties and the purchase of the golf course and this is a lever over the President, what institutions would you use that process with to get to the bottom of it? ”